What's your Strategic Plan?

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." - Winston Churchill

Every organization needs a clearly articulated mission, a vision of where it wants to go, and a plan of how it will achieve that vision. That strategic plan is the roadmap for the future - and to be effective, its implementation should be monitored continuously until goals are met.

The reality is that we live in a world of short attention spans. All too often, we make plans, set them in motion and then walk away. Job done. And only much later do we look at the results - often to our dismay.

The continuous monitoring of results gets overlooked for lots of reasons. For one thing, it’s hard - and a whole lot less fun than coming up with exciting ideas and plans. But another real issue is that results are not always easy to define. What exactly are the right results to measure, if the mission of an organization is to innovate and discover new knowledge?

Metrics are the measurements we use - both in business and in academia - to measure quantifiable aspects of organizational performance. But the metrics we chose can have unintended consequences.

A good example is measuring performance of students on standardized tests, and using this information to draw inferences about the quality of their education. This can lead to “teaching to the test” - a practise that involves focusing the curriculum on the test, training students in test taking techniques, and rote repetition of key facts and skills. This will result in good performance on the test - and in positive metrics. But it isn’t likely to give students a holistic understanding of the subject, and it isn’t likely to provide the skills that employers are looking for in the real world.

Similarly, some Universities measure the quality of their research enterprise by counting the number of articles their scientists produce, or by counting the number of papers they publish in a handful of high-profile scientific journals. This is appealing because the numbers are easy to collect and easy to measure. But it doesn’t get at the importance of the underlying work. Is this breakthrough research or “me too” science? The numbers can’t tell us.

The lesson here is that measuring the results of even the best laid plans can be harder than one might imagine - and requires at least as much attention as the actual plans themselves.